Email messaging accounts are reported to number nearly 3.9 billion in 2013, and are expected to grow another billion by the end of 2017. (from April 2013 The Radicati Group, Inc. “Email Statistics Report, 2013-2017”). Not only are the number of email accounts growing, but the volume of email messages that are transmitted is also growing, as more and more personal users and businesses rely on email for their communications.
Very often email subscribers wish to send the same email message to multiple recipients. This is facilitated by creating an electronic mailing list or email list which allows distribution of one email to multiple parties on the email list when the subscriber enters the email list name (also called a reflector address). Email lists are quite popular because they allow the email clients to efficiently propagate an email across multiple recipients. Referring now to FIG. 1, we illustrate another common scenario in propagating email messages, the “Reply All” to an existing message 100 (an email thread). The problem with “Reply All” is that it distributes the entire email thread 120, including all past emails on the thread, content, signatures, disclaimers, and attachments. This makes for a cumbersome message, forcing email clients to solve this problem by deleting the thread contents, thus adding a step to a process meant to simplify.
There is a need for a system and method to overcome the shortcomings of the known art.